Voice activity detection (VAD) is a technique used in speech processing in which the presence or absence of human speech is detected. VAD is frequently used in a variety of different systems, such as systems including speech coding, speech enhancement, speech recognition, and echo cancellation, for example. Utilizing VAD, once it is determined that a portion of a particular piece of content or signal is speech, speech recognition techniques may be used to recognize the speech and convert the spoken words into text. For various types of speech recognition, such as online speech recognition, VAD is often an afterthought. Therefore, components that are designed for non-VAD tasks are often marginally modified to perform various VAD functions. However, since these VAD components are not designed for these VAD functions, the VAD may be inaccurate and/or inefficient.